FilmStruck will be available only in the U.S. initially. It will have three pricing tiers: the entry-level service is $6.99 per month; FilmStruck + The Criterion Channel is $10.99 monthly, offering everything in the base FilmStruck subscription plan plus unlimited access to Criterion’s entire streaming library of films and special features, along with exclusive original programming; and an annual subscription of $99 per year for FilmStruck + The Criterion Channel.

FilmStruck’s rotating selection includes films from such indie studios as Janus Films, Flicker Alley, Icarus Films, Kino, Milestone, Zeitgeist, Film Movement, Global Lens, First Run Features, Oscilloscope Laboratories and Shout Factory, along with movies from major studios including Warner Bros. and MGM.

‘By combining the expertise at TCM and the Criterion Collection – two of the leading authorities in film preservation and history – we have created something really special that is a must-have for passionate film lovers,’ said Jennifer Dorian, general manager of TCM and FilmStruck. Turner commissioned a research study of 2,000 film fans across the U.S., conducted by Frank N. Magid Associates, and drew from that an estimate that there are 15 million people 18-49 in the States who would be interested in a service like FilmStruck . . .

The challenge for FilmStruck will be to capture a share of consumers’ wallets against a myriad of other SVOD offerings in the market, including mainstream players like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, as well as more directly competitive services tailored to film buffs, including Fandor and Tribeca Shortlist, a joint venture of Lionsgate and Tribeca Enterprises.

Titles to be featured on FilmStruck include Babette’s Feast, Blood Simple, Blow-Up, Breaker Morant, A Hard Day’s Night, Mad Max, Metropolis, Moulin Rouge, My Life as a Dog, Paths of Glory, The Player, A Room with a View, Seven Samurai, The Seventh Seal, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Stardust Memories, The Trip to Bountiful, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and Woodstock.

In addition, beginning Nov. 11, FilmStruck will become the exclusive streaming home to The Criterion Channel, offering what the companies say is the largest streaming collection of Criterion films available, including classic and contemporary films from around the world, interviews and conversations with filmmakers and never-before-seen programming.

With the FilmStruck deal, Criterion films are rolling off Hulu, which had been the exclusive streaming partner for Criterion’s library in the U.S. since 2011. FilmStruck will be available on the web, Android and iOS devices, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, with additional platforms and devices coming in the future. As with Netflix, Hulu and other services, FilmStruck offers only video streaming (with no downloads for offline viewing).

The FilmStruck service will feature over 70 curated and constantly refreshed programming themes, along with exclusive bonus content like hosted introductions, originally produced pieces, interviews and rare footage.” Sounds promising, and also exclusive, as the highlighted section above demonstrates. If you want Criterion versions of these classic films – the best on the market – as streaming media, then FilmStruck will be your one and only choice.

In addition, as TCM itself uses an ever-tighter playlist of classic films, this will be a welcome opportunity to move beyond the televised offerings and program your own film festival, so to speak. But as Spangler notes, the real problem will be gaining market share in an already crowded field, but for the dedicated movie buff, the Criterion “exclusive” angle will more than solve that problem, I would think.

All in all, everything is moving to the web – streaming, with no downloads and physical media. This is both a good and bad thing; I’m a diehard physical media person, and if possible, I like to get the films that I really want to see again and again on DVD or Blu-ray. But there’s no denying that there’s vast market to be tapped here, and if TCM and Criterion can do it with FilmStruck, more power to them. With the collapse of the art house circuit worldwide, everything is moving online.

As Scott Mendelson writes in Forbes, “The Hollywood Reporter is, uh, reporting that director Michelle MacLaren has left Wonder Woman. The usual ‘creative differences’ are being offered as the reason, and I’m sure there will be more details in the coming days. Her coming aboard the project was something of a big deal last December, as it would have been the first time that a female director had been handed the reins to a major comic book/superhero blockbuster title. And no, I’m not forgetting Lexi Alexander, who helmed the $30m R-rated Punisher: War Zone for Lionsgate back in 2008, but I think she’d be the first to tell you it’s not entirely the same thing. Nonetheless, as of moments ago, MacLaren has dropped out of the project, leaving its future, or at least its June 23rd, 2017 release date, in potential jeopardy [. . .]

As you recall, Marvel brought on Patti Jenkins (Monster) to helm Thor: The Dark World, but she and Marvel quickly parted ways and she was replaced by television director (Mad Men, Homicide: Life of the Street, Game of Thrones) Alan Taylor, who it should be noted did just fine with the fantasy sequel. Couple that with Catherine Hardwicke, who directed the first Twilight to blockbuster success only to part ways with the franchise and have the other four installments be directed by men, and Sam-Taylor Johnson, who directed Fifty Shades of Grey to $565m+ worldwide success only to leave the project, presumably over clashes with original author E.L. James, and we have what I would argue is a statistically improbable pattern of female directors either not making it to the finish line with high profile projects or not making it to the sequel when the finished film becomes a blockbuster.

The so-called glass ceiling for female directors helming major studio pictures is thick enough that an exception to the rule qualifies as news whenever it occurs. Without speculating about what said creative differences there might have been, one can hope that this doesn’t further the myth that female filmmakers can’t handle big-scale studio tent poles. For the sake of the project and for everything else involved in this now knotty situation, I can certainly hope that Warner Bros. doesn’t back down from its original intentions and find a female director as a replacement. Yes, it may be tokenism, and yes it may be about ‘the principle.’ But considering how hard it is for female filmmakers to get their foot in the door in comparison to their male peers, the worst thing that can happen for the perception of the project is for a male director to take over for MacLaren.

In the meantime, Michelle MacLaren is now available in case Marvel wants her for Captain Marvel. Otherwise, there are plenty of other talented female filmmakers who could use the gig and the profile boost. Beyond that, whatever ‘deep thoughts’ I might have about this will have to wait at least until we get a little more information. But come what may, this is frankly terrible news.”

“To commemorate the 90th anniversary of Warner Bros. Pictures, we’ve compiled a list of 90 historical tidbits culled from a variety of sources, including the new documentary The Brothers Warner by Cass Warner Sperling, granddaughter of Harry M. Warner. Here are the first ten tidbits:

At the end of the 19th century, the Warner family came to America from Krasnosielc, a town near Warsaw that Russia had annexed from Poland.

The family name was originally Wonskolaser.

The brothers Warner were named Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack. There were eight other children in the family.

In 1903, the three eldest Warner brothers became ‘Nickelodeon junkies,’ spending all their spare time and money on the five-cent moving picture machines.

To raise capital for his sons’ entry into the film business, a passion that required no university degree, Benjamin Warner sold his gold watch and ‘Bob,’ the horse that pulled his meat delivery wagon.

Sam procured a second-hand Edison kinetoscope projector, ‘the machine that spells certainty of success in the motion picture business,’ to launch the partnership.

Sister Rose Warner played the organ at her brothers’ first theater, the Cascade in New Castle, Pennsylvania.

Jack L. Warner was a ‘chaser,’ the theater employee charged with getting audiences to leave their seats after one screening – in his case, by singing badly. He once demonstrated his technique, bellowing ‘O sole mio!’

Albert, physically the largest of the brothers, specialized in distribution and acted as a go-between for Harry and Jack, who frequently disagreed.

Sam Warner was keenly interested in technological innovation and saved the studio in the 1920s by championing talking pictures.”

It’s World War II, and everyone is signing up; everyone, that is, except Daffy Duck, who espouses patriotism in the opening moments of Draftee Daffy, but once summoned by the Draft Board, changes his tune to “it had to be me.” Brilliantly animated by Rod Scribner, and directed by Robert Clampett, Draftee Daffy is an insidiously subversive commentary on mid 1940s social values, which finds Daffy trying every means possible to kill “the little man from the draft board” who keeps attempting to deliver Daffy’s induction notice.

When I spoke with animator John Kricfalusi — the creator of Ren and Stimpy — years ago for an interview, we bonded immediately over our shared admiration for Clampett and Scribner as an “unbeatable team” when it came to classical Hollywood studio animation; the plastic possibilities of the medium are clearly pushed to their limits in this 7 minute cartoon.

Little Caesar (1931) is one of the most violent gangster films that came out in the darkest days of the Depression, and the film that shot Edward G. Robinson to international fame as the vicious and seemingly unstoppable Caesar Enrico Bandello, who gains the nickname Little Caesar on his rise to the top of the underworld. Directed by the efficiently workmanlike Mervyn LeRoy, Little Caesar spoke to Depression-era audiences in a language they could understand; that in a world without hope, only violence would get you ahead in the world.

While MGM offered glossy, escapist entertainments, Paramount frothy exoticism, and Universal the first major cycle of American horror films, Warner Bros. concentrated on topical, gritty dramas torn from the headlines. Rico rises to the top of heap through sheer brutality alone. When he takes control of the gang he’s been running with, he tells his former boss, Sam Vettori (Stanley Fields), “you’re getting so you can dish it out, but you can’t take it.” Rico can do both; the only thing stopping him is his clearly homoerotic attachment to his one-time partner, Joe Massara (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) who wants to me a dancer, not a gangster, and who takes up with a young woman, Olga (Glenda Farrell), despite Rico’s warnings that “dames” don’t mix with business.

Scared that Joe is “going soft” and will double-cross him, Rico tries to threaten Joe, who nevertheless “turns copper” and gives him up to the police. In one of the film’s most memorable moments, Rico barges into Joe’s apartment, intent on killing him, but in a stunning close-up, Rico finds he simply can’t pull the trigger on his ex-pal. Forced into hiding, Rico discovers he has no friends left, and winds up a filthy flophouse.

But his massive ego finally proves his undoing; when the papers brand him a coward, Rico phones up his nemesis Sergeant Flaherty (Thomas Jackson) and threatens him with death. Instead, Flaherty and his men track Rico down and blast him with a tommy gun, leaving him to die in the dirt. Rico’s last words, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” have become one of the cinema’s most famous taglines. Little Caesar is thus the archetype of the American gangster film; the rise and fall of a criminal as a moral lesson for the public.

Based on the novel by W.R. Burnett, Little Caesar gave Robinson a role that any actor would have relished; he is center stage for most of the film’s action, he commands a certain amount of audience respect for his criminal exploits, and the success of the film typed him for life a movie tough guy, much to Robinson’s chagrin. In real life, Robinson was an art collector and connoisseur, with none of the “tough guy” attitude he displays in the film. But so effective was his portrayal that up until he death, he was still being cast in gangster roles of one sort of another in a multitude of films.

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions.

In The National News

Wheeler Winston Dixon has been quoted by Fast Company, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the BBC, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, US News and World Report, The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, The PBS Newshour, USA Today and other national media outlets on digital cinema, film and related topics - see the UNL newsroom at http://news.unl.edu/news-releases/1/ for more details.

UNL Film Studies Professor Wheeler Winston Dixon discusses the 2015 Ridley Scott film "The Martian," and the accuracy (and often inaccuracy) of science-fiction films at predicting real advancements in science and technology. […]